I’ve stopped scribbling on post-it notes and sticking them all over the apartment. Rejoice.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

I Hart You, Norton

There were times in undergrad I
was a begrudging English major. It wasn't I didn’t love words—I did,
and still do. It was more that there were certain authors and playwrights I
loved and others, I absolutely loathed. Case in point:

A
close up:

The
inside cover:

Lest
there be any doubt my feelings toward Mr. Joyce changed the more I read, page
115:

This is a picture of the pup...just because he's adorable.

But I digress. When I found my early 90s embellished copy of The Dubliners this week, it made me miss my Norton Anthologies. If you were an English major, you know the texts of which I speak. I lugged those Nortons, with their phone book heft and paper-thin pages, throughout my
undergraduate years in Ohio. I underlined with love. I annotated with care. The pages were well-thumbed, critically poured over and never, ever marked-up in anger a la The Dubliners. I loved my Nortons. After college, I heaved them to graduate school in New York
City, where they sat largely untouched on a bookshelf for years, collecting dust as I scampered off into new areas of writing. Then, decades later, I hauled them down to the
book donation shelf in my building’s laundry room and left them there before moving with my
husband. And now, I miss them so much.

The
fact that I so blithely donated these tomes—books that years ago I thoughtfully plucked out of the Used
section at the campus bookstore because they weren’t marked up and therefore were available
for my own notations—appalls me now. Granted, I was a journalist then and was
much more keen to read The Economist
or digest economic figures than analyze a short story or novel. And when you’re
moving in with the person you’re going to walk down every road in life with,
sometimes it's best not to haul every book and piece of paper along for the journey. The sheer amount stuff that I’d
crammed into my 300-square-foot apartment over the years was alarming--editing it down was necessary. Of course, I still showed up at our new
apartment with 10 comforters, whose bulkiness ate up so much space, my
husband blanched. But the Nortons? Those relatively
compact gems that would have had a cozy nook all their own on our bookshelf, I abandoned them (sniff...sniff).

As
they say, times, they do change, and my endeavors to write my own book have
brought me back to literature, where I started. Now I’m thinking back to all
those English courses, all those professors I had, all the stories I read, all
the critical thinking and interpretation I did, and, of course, all the papers
my roommate and I stayed up all night writing because we were such horrible
procrastinators. (I miss you, Em!) And, it goes without saying that I’m
lamenting the fact that I’m Norton-less, that the texts to my literary
education, the ones with all my notes on passages that struck a chord, are
gone.

But
James Joyce’s craptastic Dubliners?
That I still have. Perhaps it’s my penance.